Yeah, enough already, Walnuts. There I was trying to play Palin Bingo while your Veeper wannabee was going off onstage. I should have just made my own bingo card entirely consisting of the word "maverick" and awarded myself a macrame wall hanging, and called it a night.

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Watching the VP debate I was thinking this "McCain is a maverick" meme is starting to become annoying, and is very close to crossing over to cliché. And I live in Australia! I do wonder if it is being overused and people will get so tired of it that a backlash against the phrase will occur. One can hope.

But to be fair, Obama's rhetoric of being against 'special interests' is becoming rather annoying, too.

Well, one thing you have to understand about the North American mentality - more is better. If a word/phrase becomes a buzzword/phrase, like "maverick" or "change" or "hocky mom," repeating it incessantly will make it more powerful, right?

So, I watched it, but her talking points weren't getting through... Umm... Was she saying John McCain is a maverick?

...'Cos it really wasn't clear. Mebbe if she repeated it a few thousand more times.

I'm slightly deaf, see. And kinda slow on the uptake.

Also, I'd just like to say: I would never, never say Sarah Palin was deliberately trying to be 'perky and cute', nor that that's really all she seems capable of, beyond 'staying on message', where 'staying on message' means 'repeating the vapid platitudes that are your talking points ad nauseum in complete disregard to the questions the moderator asks, and with a scary parody of a forced, friendly grin on your face for the entire performance'. Because, of course, saying all she's even capable of attempting is to appear 'perky and cute' would be terribly sexist and dismissive, and if there's one thing we've learned, it's that Sarah Palin is a Very Serious VP Candidate To Be Taken Very Seriously Indeed. Even when she winks at the audience in a seriously terrifyingly forced effort to appear winsome and calls herself a hockey mom in something like the first 30 seconds of discussion.

Seriously, why is a bad parody of Shirley Temple in her 'oh my gooness' years running for VP, and what did I drink before going to bed, and when am I gonna wake up already?

Well, one thing you have to understand about the North American mentality - more is better. If a word/phrase becomes a buzzword/phrase, like "maverick" or "change" or "hocky mom," repeating it incessantly will make it more powerful, right?

Unfortunately, that's how the human mind works. George Lakoff makes this point quite clearly in his book Don't Think Of An Elephant. It's a impossible command to follow; just saying the word "elephant" forces one to think about one. That's why I think that Biden's strategy of saying "McCain's not a maverick when he does ______, and he's not a maverick when ..." was not as effective as it could have been (in fact, it may have been counter-productive). What he should have done is come up with his own catch phrase such as "yes-man" or "lackey". Then he could have repeated "McCain is a lackey when he does ______, and he's a lackey when ..." which would have been much more powerful than reinforcing McCain's own framing.

science pundit: that's a good point, although slightly overly theoretical. Unfortunately, it seems like people have given up on attack politics altogether, at least judging by CNN's up-and-down-o-meter, so that even when one of the candidates has a valid, reasonable-sounding point to make about the other guy, people just shut down altogether. I suspect your suggestion would be much more viable in countries like Canada or Britain where all the major parties at least pretend to encourage people to think about issues, because here, we really do operate almost entirely on super-simplistic judgment memes: in this case, the Obama anti-partisanship thing, only taken a bit further than he probably intended.